Outdoor Nation: Campus Challenge

DESIGN, STRATEGY, COMMUNITY

The Problem: “Outdoor Nation is a first-of-its-kind nationwide initiative created by the Outdoor Foundation to engage and activate young adults in the outdoors.” The Campus Challenge is a nationwide competition between college campuses where students log outdoor activities and are rewarded with points to help their school claim the title of, “National Outdoor Champion”. The Campus Challenge had seen successful growth in the past, but the Outdoor Foundation wanted an agency to help increase participation and develop growth on participating college campuses around the nation.

What We Did:We started by auditing the development of the Outdoor Nation Campus Challenge up to this point and took note of the campaign’ strengths and improvement areas. We developed a structure of roles and clearly identified the different audience groups that have participated in the competition in the past, and made improvements to the ways those audiences will participate in the future.

Our goal was to increase participation on the campuses that were registering and therefore increase the national exposure of the competition as a whole. We worked with the Outdoor Nation team to envision and communicate the ins-and-outs of the competition to the Campus Challenge sponsors and then translated that vision into an actionable campaign by creating visual assets and guidelines, a new website, and managing improvements to the mobile application. In 2017, the Campus Challenge grew from 16,500 to 25,000 participants on 92 campuses from around the United States. Participants logged more than 120,000 unique outdoor activities on the mobile app and spent more than 60,000 hours outside. Sponsors included outdoor retailers such as REI, The North Face, ENO and Hydro Flask.

NOTE: Embassy did not design the brand identity for Outdoor Nation and Campus Challenge. The logos and fonts were provided by Outdoor Nation.